Europe Day 13 – Munich

Breakfast was included with our room again, so we went downstairs to eat after sleeping in a little. My eyes lit up when I saw waffles, bacon, sausage, and syrup. It was too good to be true. Vanessa and I each took a bite and looked at each other. It looked like waffles, bacon, and sausage, and it was labeled that on the table, but it just didn’t taste right. I learned my lesson and went back for my traditional German breakfast. Yesterday, when I was driving into Munich I suddenly realized that we had an extra day I hadn’t planned on, so we decided to take it really easy today.

We headed out with only one site we wanted to see. Marienplatz is a large open area in front of the large, gothic, city hall that is surrounded by stores. It’s so large, I took six pictures, which I will later overlap to get the whole thing together. It was raining and drizzling, but we were prepared with our new umbrellas. We started walking along the open cobblestone street for about a half-mile until we came to an outside ice-skating rink. Originally we were supposed to go ice-skating, but my broken foot canceled those plans. Usually there is a fountain where the rink was. When I was 16, I had a liter of beer and ran through the fountain with my friends (with our clothes on).

After that, we didn’t have any plans and it was only noon. I made a couple of suggestions and we decided to go to the German Museum. Now all we had to do was find it on the map and figure out how to get there. It took us a couple of minutes, to find it on the map, another couple of minutes to figure out how to get there, and we were off. We had to walk about a mile from the station and the museum was surprisingly busy. We had to wait in line, but once inside it wasn’t bad. I had been to the museum once before, but I didn’t remember much about it other than it had big things like a windmill. Once inside I was a little disappointed (despite the full-size planes hanging from the ceiling). It was just like the Museum of Earth and Science in Los Angeles. The exhibits were extensive, but they focused around things like tunnels, electricity, glass, ceramics, musical instruments, and food science. This, in addition to the many stairs, made me ready to leave in about an hour.

We needed to find lunch, so we started walking towards a busy part of town. Vanessa really wanted Jagerschnitzel, which we first ate in Neuss. It is a deep-fried pork fillet covered with mushrooms in a white sauce. We walked almost all of the way back to the Marienplatz, but we couldn’t find it anywhere. We walked past a window with a conveyor of sushi plates going by, so we stopped to look. It was “all you can eat” for 10.90 Euros, which is about $15.00. We couldn’t resist, plus we were tired of walking, so we went in. It was okay, but definitely nothing special. It was nice to rest our feet.

Afterwards we took the subway back to the hotel. I watched some TV, while surfing the Internet and updating my blog (day 12). Vanessa took a little nap. After having trouble trying to make a decision on where to go for dinner, we ended up at the hotel restaurant again for the second night. We ate way too much, but it was good. I was happy, because the waitress talked to me in German. The previous night the waitress talked to me in English and gave me a menu in English. I can understand they get a lot of Americans in there that don’t speak English, but if I am responding to everything in German, then I appreciate it when they talk to me in German. So, it’s 10:00 pm now, (1:00 pm in Los Angeles) and I’m getting tired. Tomorrow we will be visiting Dachau, the concentration camp, and will have dinner at the Hofbrauhaus (beer hall) to lighten the mood a little.